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Better late than never: City responds to citizen complaint from 2013
By adamg on Tue, 12/27/2016 - 10:01am
On March 14, 2013, when Tom Menino was still mayor, a resident filed a complaint with the city about five feet of sidewalk caving in on Chandler Street in the South End. This morning, a city engineer marked the case closed:
This location has been inspected and all repairs appear to have been made.
Neighborhoods:
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Comments
Bravo
Look, we can complain that it took a long time, or we can applaud that things are getting fixed. Well, we can (and should!) do both.
Communities across Massachusetts have been cutting DPW staff for at least a decade. Part of it is due to genuine efficiencies (e.g. automated trash collection trucks requiring less staffing). Lots of it, methinks, is due to Prop 2.5 forcing a shrinking of government, and choosing between teachers, cops, firefighters, and DPW is pretty easy, as DPW doesn't have the heartstring pull that the other three do.
So, we have smaller and smaller DPWs -- good middle class jobs for less-well-educated men and women. We have a reduced ability to maintain our streets sidewalks bike lanes and multi-use paths. We have a reduced ability to ensure safety in our water system and our sewer system. We have less ability to remove snow, to pick up litter, to empty trash barrels in community centers. Our parks and playgrounds suffer.
The irony is that DPW is extremely cost effective. What's the societal cost of a slip-and-fall? What's the economic cost of a suffering business district in part due to dilapidated infrastructure? Taken to an extreme, what's the cost to communities like Flint for poor water quality?
So good on Boston for repairing the Chandler Street sidewalk, and here's to support for DPW in 2017 and beyond.
/rant
Meanwhile
People shrink municipal budgets because they have control over them, even though that is where most of their services come from, and fail to see how much of our tax money gets sucked out of the state and into those holier-than-thou red states who preach independence while being propped up by our money.
Local property taxes don't go
Local property taxes don't go to other states. So stop trying to blame Kansas for your cracked sidewalk in Southie.
Cuts to DPW services has more to do with bloated administrative overhead than anything else.
Federal taxes go to other states
Please learn to read.
People mad about their OVERALL tax burden shoot themselves in the foot by holding their little tax revolts and reducing LOCAL taxes (which pay for services) when the problem is FEDERAL taxes going to Kansas and other teaparty shitholes and none of it coming back to us!
You are a true fool if you think it works in any other way. People throw little fits over the things they control, and ignore the freaking elephant eating all their money in another state!
Reducing Local Taxes?
I've lived in Boston, Brookline, and Medford over the past 20 years. Not once have taxes gone down. They either stay steady of rise slightly. Maybe other towns are cutting but not in the places I've lived.
I'm scratching my head here
How local services are paid in Boston has little to do with federal taxes or net flows of federal tax monies to Kansas or any other state.
If Kansas wants to screw up infrastructure in the name of low taxes, fine. Businesses will see the value of a well educated workforce with a decent infrastructure and will set up shop here.
Here is the argument
This has been going on since the Cold War.
People get upset about taxes, and attack the ones they can directly control rather than the ones they can't. This means that they cut the taxes that pay for most of their services, rather than the ones that yield little payback to their communities.
That's the simplistic version.
Here's the reality - like a lot of reality, it is complicated, so you might not want to believe it, but you can look at patterns of spending over time and do your own analysis:
The problem we have now is that what we pay for local and state taxes is not keeping pace with the costs of the government that we expect/need. That is due to Prop 2 1/2 - that little tax tantrum/hissy fit people threw before your time and my time and enshrined in law so that it is hard to change it even though its supporters are six feet under now and never gave a shit about the long term consequences anyway.
Craprop 2.5 has hamstrung local communities. Meanwhile, lesser tax tantrum hissy fits have cut the available state money, and we get less and less of our rightful share of the federal money (the amount we get has been dwindling compared to what we pay in because blue states have things like jobs and functioning economies and not everyone is on welfare, etc.) That means that the fed expects our communities to pay for lots of things that we used to get in return for our federal taxes, the state expects our communities to pay for lots and lots of things that we used to get in return for our state taxes, and our local communities (which provide most services) can't fill potholes in a timely manner.
I encourage all you "BUT WASTE AND ABUSE AND BLAH BLAH" types to put up or shut up. Or, better yet, run for Mayor because you know everything! The fact is that our communities have increasingly fewer resources available to do some pretty basic things, so things get triaged. This is also inefficient - if you can't do maintenance, you pay more in the long run (and the state will no longer just bail you out!).
You don't know much
Particularly about my views on taxation.
Look, Prop 2 1/2 has its pros and cons, but in the end it has nothing to do with either federal taxation or any means of taxation in the great state of Kansas. Stevil can go on (and if he wants he will) about how the pot gets divided up, and some notice needs to be made of how state aid to cities and towns (and of course state taxation overall, since we are comparing Massachusetts to Kansas, not Boston to wherever in Kansas), but in the end federal taxation and fund transfers has nothing to do with this.
By the way, I was around when Question 2 passed. Wasn't a voter, and I did find it odd that my city worker aunt was in favor of it, but yes, I remember it. And Boston got hit worse because of the Trager decision (before your time, so I don't blame you for not remembering it) but in the end Massachusetts' finances and the finances of the City of Boston improved, so whatever. Gas tax should go up, but that's all I'll say about that.
Not historically accurate
The tax revolts took place before you were likely to have had a solid idea what the issues were, let alone researched any of the fallout for college papers. You might see if you can get a copy of Lowery, David and Lee Seligman, “Understanding the Tax Revolt: Eight Explanations,” American Political Science Review 75(1981): 963-74.
The major issue was the entire tax burden. However, people had little control over the federal bloat that was the arms race, so they sought to lower other taxes over which they did have control.
That's pretty well established history. It has, however, left us with a situation where we have very limited ability to raise local spending to make up for dwindling input from state and federal taxes.
Yet I remember the effects
And I know that Reagan didn't send cash to cover the shortfall. The Commonwealth stepped up. The poster was conflating local taxes and federal funds going to states like Kansas, and the two are not linked.
But why the defense of the property tax? It is the most regressive of taxes. With the income tax, more money is collected as income goes up. In a place like Massachusetts, sales tax is exempted for necessities like food and clothing, but in any event it is based on consumption. The property tax has nothing to do with ability to pay.
old complaint
3-4 years is not average time for Boston 311 issues. Most complaints are handled in a timely manner.
Yep
That's what struck me about this. I'm sure the problem was fixed long ago and the 311, um, Mayor's Hotline, complaint just never got formally closed.
That's not my experience lately
I used to be very impressed by the city's responsiveness to requests opened via the 311 app. Not so much so, lately.
Three different examples over the past two months or so:
I'm pretty much done wasting my time with this system.
I'm not sure if the system is
I'm not sure if the system is designed to deal with "happening at this moment" complaints. It sounds like you may also be filing these late in the day when there is a barebones staff. So wheoever is in charge looks, see's it is not absolute priority, sends it to the correct department, department checks pretty much as soon as they see it upon getting to work and then they go check it out.
Unless the city were fully staffed 24-7 the system will not operate the way you expect it to.
Timeliness: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months
I don't think 311 does very well for issues that span minutes or hours. All three of your examples include violations that matter today but aren't likely to exist tomorrow. 311 isn't a good resource for this -- instead, just call the police (or health inspector).
311 seems to do much better job for issues that span days or more. Broken infrastructure, graffiti, that sort of thing.
Don't give up on 311, but don't expect it to work for transient violations either.
Um, Bob
Those first 2 are 911 issues. 311 doesn't have a rapid response team, but the BPD does. The third one was pretty poor on the part of ISD, assuming they got the gripe in time. If there was a delay, 311 is totally the problem.
2nd
Captain John Greland, South Boston, told me personally to dial 911 to report parking violations.
Some complaints aren't that easy
I put one in that wasn't closed for 9 months to a year. It involved Eversource and some serious electrical work. I put the complaint in to make sure it was noted. And I did follow up a few months into the situation. I almost went to my city councillor, but then it was fixed. Yay!
I've been submitting weekly
I've been submitting weekly reports for MONTHS about a gas streetlight out on Pinckney Street. Occasionally I will get a response ("closed, fixed"), but the next time I visit, the light is (still) out. So I report it again. And again. And again.
They assign me an incident number, and you would think some data nerd would be able to figure out that the light keeps getting reported and dispatch someone out to fix it. Or at the very least, write back and say "due to construction, we can't fix this light until DATE". If that's even the case, that is.
I will say that Boston 311 is better at fixing potholes. I've reported one and it was filled within 48 hours.
As in ...
Summarily dismissed as not existing despite repeated and well-documented evidence of a constant or recurrent problem.
Correction
Umm, the Neighborhoods tag says West End, but Chandler Street is clearly South End (as the piece says).
The sidewalks on Chandler are
The sidewalks on Chandler are still a mess and a hazard to pedestrians. There have been countless times pedestrians trip over the bricks that need to be re paved 're-bricked'. When the city works on their new handicapped ramps they should complete the entire street. Maybe they'll finish in another three years.
Berkeley Street took 3+ months
I can't believe how long it took for to re-brick some of the sidewalks on Berkeley from Tremont to the Mass Pike bridge. Google street view has the cones set up as of October.
Yeah I'm not seeing the
Yeah I'm not seeing the original report, but I do recall an area that's currently being rehabbed having a hole that looked like it could provide a home for a mini-sarlacc. Someone put a DPW metal sawhorse over it and seemed to call it a day - but the hole was there for at least a year. It's a bit scary they'd just leave it like that.